Dante attended King's College School from 1837 to 1842, when he left to prepare for the Royal Academy of Art. In 1846 he was accepted into the Academy but was there only a year before he became disillusioned and frustrated and left to study under the painter Ford Madox Brown. In 1848 he, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais began to call themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This group attracted other young painters, poets, and critics; William Michael Rossetti, Dante’s brother, acted as secretary and later historian for the group.

In 1849 and 1850 Rossetti started exhibiting his paintings and at about the same time he met Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, who became a model for many of his paintings and sketches. They were engaged in 1851 but did not marry until nine years later in 1860, perhaps because of her ill health, his constant financial difficulties, or possibly a simple unwillingness to undertake the commitment to an obsessed artist.

A commission to cover the walls of the Oxford Debating Union with Arthurian murals in 1856 and 1857 introduced Rossetti to William Morris and kept him focused on painting and not on Morris’ wife whom he had fallen in love with. Rossetti’s own wife, after an engagement lasting nearly ten years, and a marriage of just over a year ended when Lizzie Siddal died from a self-administered overdose of morphia on February 10, 1862. Although suicide was suspected, the coroner generously decided that her death was accidental.

After her death Rossetti moved to a large house on the Thames in Chelsea, which he shared with his good friend Swinburne and also on occasion with his brother William Michael Rossetti. He continued painting and writing poetry, gaining patrons enough to become relatively prosperous. Another of his models, Fanny Cornforth became his mistress and housekeeper, but was never one of his idealized women. That role was filled first by his wife Lizzie Siddal; but most famously by his unobtainable love Janey Morris.

In 1871 Rossetti and Morris leased a Manor in Oxfordshire, and Morris visited Iceland, leaving Rossetti together with Jane and her children. Although biographers still argue about what exactly went on among them, the triangle was in any case a difficult situation for all concerned.

In the late 1860's Rossetti began to suffer from headaches and weakened eyesight, and began to take chloral mixed with whiskey to cure his life-long bout with insomnia. Although he continued to paint feverishly, the Chloral accentuated the depression and paranoia that was latent in Rossetti's nature, and in the summer of 1872 he suffered a mental breakdown, complete with hallucinations and accusing voices. He was taken to Scotland, where he attempted suicide, but gradually recovered, and within a few months was able to paint again. His health continued to deteriorate slowly (as he was still taking chloral), and his insomnia worsened but this did not interfere with his work. He continued to paint both day and night sleeping only periodically. He died of kidney failure on April 9, 1882.